Identifying the most likely outcomes of multilateral negotiations

Abstract

New definitions and methodology are proposed in this paper to predict the most likely outcomes of multilateral negotiations. The negotiation problems modeled and analyzed here are distinctive because the set of possible agreements is discrete and specified in advance. Each decision maker has two concerns: first, achieving an alternative that is as preferable as possible; second, building support among the other decision makers for this alternative. The general objective of this research is to study movements from one state to another in multilateral negotiations, to predict stable agreements, and to study their properties. In addition, we propose some procedures that measure the relative likelihood of moves from an unstable state to stable agreements. An example is used to clarify how this methodology can be applied to predict outcomes of negotiations.